DIY – Room Spray

If you aren’t already hooked on essential oils, this DIY room spray project will have you jumping on the “oil” bandwagon. You’ll fall in love with this delicious smelling alternative to artificially scented room sprays! The recipe is easy to follow and you can even improvise to create your own scents.

People have been using essential oils for millennia. Today, most essential oils are made by using steam distillation to remove the essential oils from plants and mechanical expression is used to extract the oils from citrus fruits.

Essential oils smell wonderful and some people claim that they also have therapeutic benefits. For the purpose of this DIY project, we will ignore the potential therapeutic benefits and focus on the olfactory pleasures that essential oils can provide. And, who is to say that wonderful smelling things can’t make us feel a little bit better?

Directions:1. Pour 3.5 oz. distilled water into a liquid measuring cup
Since essential oils are so potent, they need to be diluted with distilled water for room sprays. You can find gallon jugs of distilled water at most grocery stores for less than a dollar. Distilled water is more pure than regular tap water and will help your room spray stay fresher longer.

2. Pour 1 tsp. vodka or witch hazel into the measuring cup
The vodka or witch hazel will help preserve your room spray.

3. Add 50 drops of the desired essential oil/s into the measuring cup
Essential oils are not cheap, so go to a natural grocery store and use the samples to test out some scents before you buy them. Even though the price for a tiny bottle of essential oil may seem steep, you only need to use a tiny portion for this project.

4. Carefully pour the mixture into a 4 oz. glass spray bottle
You can find glass spray bottles near the essential oils in most natural grocery stores or online. Glass bottles are recommend for essential oil mixtures because the oils can cause plastic to breakdown. Amber or cobalt glass bottles will help protect your oils from sunlight and will extend the shelf life of your room spray.

5. Label the bottle
Use a sticker or string and a tag to create a label for your room spray. I used mailing labels to label the cobalt bottles and some old cardboard from a box of tea and twine for the clear bottle. Include the ingredients on your label, and feel free to create special names for your unique recipes.

Rachel Kauffman is vaguely interested in everything, but she is particularly obsessed with finding and collecting (and occasionally selling) vintage artifacts. When she’s not admiring and curating things that dead people have made, Rachel can be found making stuff: room sprays, tomte, pressed flower art, rugs, and whatever else she impulsively decides to try to make. She lives with her family in an adorable mid-century ranch in Prairie Village, Kansas. Email Rachel at rachelannekauffman@gmail.com and follow her on Instagram @racheldeerhead.

DIY – Room Spray

VintageKC, a high-end quarterly publication, seeks to inform readers of the greater metro Kansas City area (and beyond) of the styles, lifestyles, creative techniques, and arts and crafts of the past and present, and how they fit into the present-day world of people and things.